Chapter 6: Autumn

I had forgotten how crisp country mornings were, and the skin on my legs and arms puckered with every step I took towards my house. It was a hell of a walk, over five miles to be exact, but I’d hitched a ride to the rodeo yesterday and didn’t have any other way of getting back. The wind blew and kicked up the fabric of my dress, and I ran my fingers quickly through my hair in a desperate attempt to make myself look presentable. My stomach had felt physically nauseous when I woke up that morning and realized I’d overslept because I knew if my parents realized I hadn’t come home last night, they would have sent the police force out looking for me.

Granted, I knew I was doing to Dallas what I’d done all those years ago, but didn’t know what to do about it.

So I had gotten up, crept out of bed without waking him, pulled my dress on over my body as silently as I could, tip-toed to the bathroom, and wet down a washcloth before slathering some cheap soap on it to clean myself. I had been able to smell him as the crust of our juices crinkled on my leg and needed to clean myself before making the five-mile walk of shame back to my house.

Was I really ashamed though?

No.

Never of Dallas.

But it was a small town and people had a tendency to talk, so I knew rumors would start to fly and my walk of shame would somehow wind up with me being pregnant and Dallas asking me to have a shotgun wedding just before he went to ride his bull off into the sunset. And while the idea of having children with Dallas wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, he sure as hell wouldn’t want to have them in Paris. He was a country boy through-and-through, and they didn’t need ranchers in a city like Paris.

By the time the sun began to break through the tree line, my house finally came into sight. The sprawling plantation rose above the flowers my mother kept meticulously cultivated in our front yard, and the massive trees that stood on either side of the house shaded the driveway as I tiptoed up the cement. The white house with the towering columns loomed over the town, like the beacon of a lighthouse over the treacherous shores of the sea.

My parents raised horses and bred them for the derby, and when they weren’t tending to breed some of the strongest race horses together, they were running summer camps for children and teenagers. When I was growing up, people came from other states to enroll their children in the camp my parents ran, but when my dad got sick, the doctor told him he had to slow down some. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and promptly had a pacemaker put in, but he couldn’t keep up the schedule he was used to. My mother and I tried to pick up the slack as much as we could, and even Dallas jumped in for a time while we were in college to help during the summers. But the three of us couldn’t pull the weight my dad used to, and the camps had to close themselves down around the time I graduated.

My mother kept breeding and raising the horses, and my father helped her with the feed and repaired the stalls when they needed repairing, but his health was slowly deteriorating, and with that deterioration came less and less he could do. Last summer they sold the back half of their ranch to help pay the bills. Twenty-eight acres of land sold back to the city so they could cultivate more living areas for the growing community college. Granted, they still had twenty-eight acres of land between them and that construction going on, but it was the hardest decision my father had ever made, and to this day, I think my mother regrets it.

I stood in the shade of the porch longer than I should have, and it wasn’t until the sun began to shine around the column that I realized I’d probably waited too late to walk in. But I figured my parents would just now be stirring awake, so if I could get up the steps before they actually came out of their room downstairs, I’d still be home-free and could dodge all the questions they would have. Sure, they’d known I was going to the rodeo, and I’m a big girl who can stay out all night if I wanted to, but it wouldn't take them long to put two and two together once they realized Dallas ‘Bullheaded’ Rawlings was being featured during the bull riding event, and I wasn’t ready for the questions they would inevitably throw my way.

I dug out the spare key from underneath the mat and slowly slipped it into the lock. I opened the front door and it dumped me into a high-ceilinged foyer. When I turned to place the key back underneath the mat, I locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief; I’d made it into my house without anyone suspecting me. I smiled when I shut the door behind me and leaned up against it.

“You should’ve used the back door.”

I jumped when I heard my mother’s voice waft from the kitchen. I cursed underneath my breath and closed my eyes for a second. I knew I had been cutting it close, and it was my fault I’d got lost in my own stupid memories while I standing out in the driveway.

“Hey, Mom,” I smiled meekly. I slowly padded down the hallway and stuck my head in the kitchen, seeing my mother sitting there. If there was ever a woman that exuded country sophistication, it was her: back straight, shoulders rolled, hair neatly pinned, and her stud earrings she wore as part of her nightly appearance shone from her ears. Sure, the wrinkles of time and work had etched themselves into her skin, but her voice was light, her legs were always crossed at the ankles, and she always used her manners no matter the situation or person before her.

“Why don’t you come have some coffee?” she offered. Her body slowly rose from the chair and she placed her coffee cup on the table.

I knew when she asked that question, I really didn’t have a choice; my mother, always phrased commands in the form of a question to make herself appear unthreatening when really, she expected you to obey every word that poured from her lips. I never did figure out how to mock the grace and poise she had when I was a child, but my father always told me I wasn’t something to be harnessed.

“No, your father isn’t awake yet,” she said lightly, sensing my thoughts as only a mother could.

I heard her pour the cup of coffee before a spoon began clanking around the ceramic. She padded back towards me and placed the cup down in front of me. Even though I sat back into the chair and tossed my wild hair back, she sat with her back straight and curled her delicate fingers around the jovially-colored mug.

“Where were you last night?” my mother asked.

“Went out with some friends after the rodeo,” I said before bringing the mug to my lips, hastily taking a sip of coffee that was too hot.

“When will I convince you that I wasn’t born in a barn, Autumn?”

I sighed into my mug and closed my eyes before the question that spewed forth from her lips graced my tired ear drums.

“Were you with Dallas?”

The mere mention of his name fluttered my heart, lurched my gut, and made tears form behind my eyelids. Attempting to distract myself, I took another large swig of my coffee, not caring how hot it was. I then took a deep breath and answered, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you have a productive… conversation?”

“Probably not the one you think I should’ve had,” I quipped.

“So, he still doesn’t know about Paris?”

I opened my eyes once I got my emotions under control, seeing my mother shaking her head. My parents had adored Dallas back when I was in college, and my father always told me he was the one I was meant to be with. My mother thought he was the epitome of a southern gentleman, and my father knew he was the only one who wouldn’t try to tame the wild spirit that was my soul.

“He rides the buck. He don’t tame it,” my father always jokingly said. And he was right, of course. No matter what I did, I did with all the passion in the world and Dallas never once tried to stop that. He’d laugh and sometimes poke fun at my sincerity and passion, but never tried to stop it or talk me out of it.

“You owe it to him to tell him, Autumn. You broke that poor boy’s heart.”

As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I knew my mother was right. “Yeah, and that’s all that seems to get brought up,” I muttered.

“Well, what else is there to say?”

“How about the fact that I hurt just as much when I walked away?”

“Then why did you walk away?”

“Because Paris called and offered me my dream job, Mom!” I exclaimed.

Why was she not able to understand that?

“And why did that require not telling Dallas?” she asked with her eyebrows raised.

“Because I knew if he asked me to stay, I wouldn’t have gone!”

I felt my breath hitch in my throat before tears sprang to my eyes. I knew my mother meant well, but I’d never really talked about it with her. I had never talked about how leaving Dallas that night had really altered me in some way, and how it altered the fashions I designed while I was working up the ranks in Paris. A little piece of him was in every design I made. And every fashion that went on a man, I imagined on his body first.

Images of his chiseled form came wafting back to my mind, and the sounds of last night began to echo off the corners of my memory before my mother’s voice broke through my musings and told me something that absolutely rooted me to the kitchen chair.

“Dallas came to look for you after you left. Showed up on our doorstep looking like a homeless kitten trying to figure out where you were. We had no idea what he was talking about until we found the note in your room about the job in Paris, but by the time we came back to show it to him, he had taken off for his car and skidded out of the driveway, and that sweet boy never did come back.”

“He… he came here?” I said, breathing heavily as the blood slowly drained from my face.

Mom nodded. “Yes. The day after graduation.

I sat there, gripping my mug, positively stunned. Dallas had come to my house looking for me. After leaving him cold and alone in his dorm room after all of those graduation parties, he ran to my parents’ house looking for me. I felt a wave of guilt rise up in my throat. My stomach grew sour and I couldn’t stand to take another sip of my coffee.

Tears ricocheted down my cheeks. In any other moment in my life, I’d be embarrassed to cry in front of my mother. She was the epitome of emotional reserve. I had never even so much as heard her yell unless she was shouting across the barn at my father. But at that point, I didn’t care. I’d just left Dallas to wake up naked and cold and alone in a trailer five years after I’d done it the first time. It was the worst kind of déjà vu.

I felt like I was going to be sick.

“You owe him an explanation, sweetheart. If anything, to clear your own conscience,” Mom said.

But now, I didn’t know if I could handle telling him. How could I look at the only boy I’d ever loved and tell him I hadn’t trusted myself around him? How could I look at the man he had blossomed into and tell him that he’d tamed the strong, untamable woman that I was? How in the world was I supposed to look at the man I’d now left twice that the reason I kept leaving him behind was because I didn’t think he could come with me if I offered? There was no gentle way to say that a man like him just didn’t belong in a place like Paris.

So how in the world could I possibly tell Dallas that the reason I left the way I did was because I wasn’t strong enough to do it any other way?

I felt the bile rise to the top of my throat before I pushed my coffee mug away. I shoved myself away from the kitchen table and headed for the staircase, knowing that deep down, no matter how much I didn’t want to, I needed to talk to him. At some point, hopefully soon, I needed to tell him everything.

Because at the end of the day, my mother was right.